SOLIDWORKS Tips and Tricks and Info on Professional 3D Printing with Stratasys from the Technical staff of CATI.

May 14, 2013

Free SolidWorks from Performance Constraints (FSWPC-13-#15)

(Modeling Methodology - Defeature)

In one of our previous articles we talked about reducing the level of detail in our parts and subassemblies and one of the questions we have been asked is what features and tools that SolidWorks provides gives us the best benefit when working with large assemblies. We looked at all the different tools available to us and we are starting with the Defeature tool.

Defeature can be used on parts or assemblies and has a wizard style interface that walks you through several different steps to remove features from you file. The Defeature tool has many different options and while faster than manually defeaturing the your files you do have less control over the final results.

For our assembly once again due to the overall size we choose to use Defeature on just the Cab Assembly and used the options for removing the internal components and ended up with a single part file that was 401mb had 271 Surface Bodies and 1316 Solid Bodies.

Note: These changes can have a larger or smaller effect on each users performance depending on how many over detailed parts are defeatured and what options are used.

You can by looking at our deltas see that on both our Practical and Typical machine defeatureing our model added just above or below 20% to our benchmark. Where on our Typical machine that same 20% increase adds almost 1 hour to our benchmark vs. the 14 min it adds to our Practical machine benchmark. We figure that reason for the increase in our benchmark time is that this not being an assembly we created and have intimate knowledge of the assembly we took the default settings and thus costing us time vs. saving us time as we would expect.

Please
check back to the CATI blog as we will continue posting our
series of articles that goes further into the details of each of our tests. All
of these articles will be stored in the category of Free SolidWorks from Performance
Constraintsand links to each with their
release date are listed below: